How did you welcome in 2013? Did you host an open house and invite your neighbors over to reflect, opine, eat or drink? Did you go out for a fancy night on the town? Or did you opt for the robe and pajamas route, sitting down with a good book as the minutes passed, taking 2012 with them?

As I look back over six decades of New Year’s Eves, there’s no discernible pattern in how I chose to say good-bye to the old and hello to the new.

As a little kid, I could never keep my eyes open long enough to see the actual “changing of the guard.” And even when I put on a few years and was able to make it, there were plenty of times when I wasn’t interested. Guy Lombardo and the swishy party at the Waldorf Astoria fell a bit flat for me. I didn’t smoke or drink, and I really didn’t know how to do all those dances where you actually had to make contact with your partner.

But then, the “boy” years rolled in, and the teens in our community usually tried to party together in someone’s basement, with occasional walk-throughs by the unhappy parents who had to endure the scratchy rock-and-roll records blasting up from below — until midnight had come and gone. I hosted one and my mother was aghast that I insisted on rolling up the carpet. But I knew better. Teenage boys like to stomp brownies into the floor.

College was irrelevant. I was usually at home when Dec. 31 rolled into Jan. 1.

The first year my husband was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, we were invited to some friends’ apartment, a couple blocks away on the South Side of the city. We walked, heading for home shortly after midnight. The get-together was pretty boring, really.

But what we met outside was anything but. Apparently — at least back then — it was a tradition to fire a gun out the window as a salute to the new year ahead. Eventually, all those bullets have to come down. Far from feeling like we’d turned a page and moved on, we felt like we were running in place, unable to get inside our building fast enough.

Once you have kids, the late-night festivities — at least in our house — all but bit the dust. New Year’s? I was lucky to make it to 9 p.m. Soon enough, it would be 5 a.m. — and yes, a new year would have happened. I’d be one of the no-fun early-birds to say “Welcome!” No need to blow a horn or wear a silly hat at this hour — unless it made my toddler laugh.

Early on in my Advance career, I would frequently volunteer to work on New Year’s Day because I didn’t go out the night before and didn’t really celebrate the day of. At least, I didn’t think so.

One year, with an 8 a.m. shift on my calendar, I accompanied a girlfriend of mine to a house in our neighborhood, Stapleton, to while away the last few hours of some year with some music and a glass or two of wine. Quite unexpectedly, I had a blast. I fell into bed at 5 a.m. When that alarm went off two hours later, I thought I would die. The day was so cold, several events I was to cover were canceled, so I sat in the newsroom and answered the occasional telephone call, doing a poor version of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Lois Lane.

It’s strange; as I look back, though some of these momentary, over-hyped passages of time stay with me, way more do not. One year, a restaurant; the next year, snuggled in bed.

Do you have something you do year-in, year-out, that marks the official end of one year and the start of the next? Is there a special food that must be present?

Feel free to let me know how you celebrate the transition. Maybe it’s still not too late to start a tradition of my own. You can email hack@siadvance.com; post a comment to this column at SILive.com, or call me at 718-816-8350.